Comments Off on The Importance of Optimism – Part 2
Optimism is a choice. Events do not change us. Our perceptions of events change us.
A man loses a child in a car wreck and shakes his fist at God: if God were good, then he never would have let this happen. The man’s wife instead sees a broken world where an unhappy stranger drinks to much, runs a stop sign, and kills her child. God is good. Only he can bring comfort and peace after such a loss. Only he can fix the world’s brokenness.
The man loses his child, and his faith atrophies. His wife loses her child, and her faith grows. Both experience the same traumatic event. Both change because of it, but their perceptions of that trauma determine the change.
Circumstances may turn optimism and hope for a better world into a daily wrestling match, but our perceptions of those circumstances and the attitudes that those perceptions form over time either increase or diminish our ability to recover from trauma, disappointment, and failure. Optimism will cost you more than pessimism, but pessimism never pays dividends.
Perhaps the world is not full of idiots but of splendor.
